Nowhere has the traditional journalism business model taken a bigger hit than help-wanted advertising, that staple of the classifieds that for decades was nearly the only place to turn to fill or find a job.
In just one year, from 2002-2003, help wanted revenues at the San Jose Mercury News dropped by more than $100 million, falling from more than $120 million to less than $18 million. Since then, the growing popularity of such free listings as Craigslist — as well as the deepening economic crisis — have propelled the free-fall. For the fourth quarter of 2008, the New York Times Co. reported a drop in print and online employment ads of more than 40 percent.
As a former publisher of the Star-Tribune in Minneapolis, MinnPost founder Joel Kramer knows this story well. So why is the newest link in the MinnPost navigation bar pointing to something called Search MN Jobs?
Still in what Kramer describes as a soft launch, the jobs page is a partnership with a Minneapolis-based service called LinkUp that scrapes and aggregates (with permission) openings that companies post to their own Web sites.
Kramer said that MinnPost, a non-profit local news and opinion site launched in November 2007, created its jobs page just a couple of weeks ago and has collected no data on it yet. The only revenue will come from a 50-50 split with LinkUp on click-throughs to sponsored links at the top of pages like this one.
The idea is a one-stop search of mostly invisible job ads that can be customized by region and keyword. Thus the tagline: “Exposing Minnesota’s hidden jobs.”
Kramer said his staff is developing a homepage widget to spotlight a job of the day. Still, help wanted ads will likely remain a junior partner in an economic model that includes grants, sponsorship and membership as well as display advertising.
“We have nothing in the budget for it, so there are no assumptions,” he said in a telephone interview last week. “What interests me is that this is a different kind of job database that’s better than many others.”
If not a big source of revenue, will it become a traffic driver? MinnPost’s page views topped the monthly rate of one million for the first time Friday, an audience Kramer believes is the largest of any Web-only news site serving a local audience.
He hopes MinnPost will be able to sustain itself by 2012, but acknowledges, “It’s tough right now. We’re growing, but we’re not on our original plan because the economy is so grim. I don’t know of anybody hitting their original plan in this economy.”
Rising unemployment — resulting in fewer job ads — means more bad news for the old model of paid help-wanted.
The interesting question for the MinnPost/LinkUp model: Will the growing number of people out of work increase revenue-producing clicks on those sponsored jobs?
By Bill Mitchell
23 Feb 2009
source: poynter.org